Sunday, August 21, 2016

The lingering consquences of idealistic 60s liberalism

My generation has a lot to answer for. Recreational drugs,
for example – or as former Wellington coroner Garry Evans preferred to call
them, “wreckreational drugs”.

Mine was the generation that rebelled against the values of
its parents. We were smug and spoilt, with plenty of time on our hands to
reflect on how wrong our elders were about everything.

We rejected their dreary, conformist moral values. “If it
feels good, do it” became the catch-cry of a generation.

And it did feel good – for a while. But then the casualties
began to pile up. Drug abuse, serial relationship failures and, most tragically,
emotionally damaged offspring are part of the price society has paid for idealistic
1960s liberalism.

Initially, drugs seemed very much a middle-class hippie thing.
Most of the dope smokers and trippers I knew in the late 60s were arty types
and intellectuals. Drugs were one way of rebelling against a society they found
dull and stifling.

Quite a few ended up permanently damaged, but others
succeeded in managing their drug use. They were smart enough to ensure that it
never seriously interfered with their lives or careers.

Most were well-educated and came from relatively prosperous backgrounds,
so were buttressed against any disadvantages that might have come from drug
use. But the same could not be said of the people who were caught up in the
drug culture once it spread out into other sectors of society.

In fact there’s a segment of society that, from the 1980s
on, was hit by a disastrous double-whammy.

The first blow came when economic upheaval wiped out many of
the jobs that had previously provided poorly educated workers with a
livelihood. The second came with the increasing availability – and social
acceptability – of drugs.

Many of the people whose jobs disappeared in the 1980s sought
escape in cannabis, glue and later, methamphetamine. Tinny houses sprouted like
mushrooms in low-income areas.

Unlike the comfortable bureaucrats who now advocate
liberalisation of the drug laws, these people were not insulated from the
harmful effects of drugs by a good education and secure, well-paid careers. So
they, and their children and grandchildren, are doubly disadvantaged.

To put it another way, it was the middle class that
introduced society to the mind-expanding delights of drugs, but it’s mainly the
underbelly of society that has had to live with the consequences.

It’s against this backdrop that we need to consider the current
pressure to liberalise the cannabis laws. The people promoting liberalisation
are from the educated middle classes. They probably live a long way from the
suburbs where drug abuse causes misery.

The reformers advance persuasive arguments. They say drug
use should be treated as a health issue rather than one of law and order.

The taxpayer-subsidised Drug Foundation, which is leading
the charge for cannabis law reform (but which betrays an ideological bias by contradictorily
taking a shrill line against alcohol), cleverly plays on public sympathy for
terminally ill cancer patients such as former trade union leader Helen Kelly.

But while there are there are valid arguments for
decriminalisation of cannabis, and especially for its medicinal use, the
reformers can’t ignore the baneful effects of drug use.

Neither can they ignore the risk that liberalising the cannabis
laws will send the dangerous message that drugs are OK. They may be okay if
you’ve got a university degree and live in a good suburb, but they’re not so liberating
if you’re a hungry kid living in a freezing state house where any surplus money
goes on P rather than food or heating.

Many of the reformers seem blind to much of the damage done
by drug use. But Garry Evans saw it in his 18 years as a coroner. He told this newspaper
on his retirement that the term ‘recreational drug’ was a misnomer; put a “w”
in front of it, he said, and you’d be closer to the truth.

Evans would know, and so do the people who conducted Otago
University’s famous longitudinal study of 1000 people born in 1972. Drug abuse is
a consistent factor among those in the study who went off the rails.

These are reasons to proceed with caution. As Massey
University drug policy expert Chris Wilkins says, any change needs to be
carefully thought through. “We can’t treat cannabis like we do any other
commodity in the supermarket.”

A good starting point for the debate might be a more honesty.
“Alcohol wicked, dope okay” – the line promoted by the Drug Foundation –
suggests some ideological decontamination might be helpful.

3 comments:

Yours was certainly the first generation to have to deal with drugs. Growing up in the late 50's and early 1960's we had alcohol to content with but no drugs as such. If they had been around I would have heard about it. We were the children that had been born during the war- a small population recruited to deal with the much larger population group that were the baby boomers from 1946 onward. Looking back we grew up in a NZ world little changed by the war but going into much more change.Personally I see the huge contradictions of young people who want to smoke cannabis but want NZ to be smokefree by 2025, who are incredibly fussy about food 'are these eggs free range?' asked my step-grand-daughter but who don't seem to think twice about popping pills when they have no idea what they contain. A generation who are concerned about the environment but litter on a grand scale......

Prohibitive drug laws can be liberalised without necessarily endorsing recreational drug use. There are several issues at play, not least of all individual sovereignty over one's body and the right to put things into it. By banning the use of some drugs, the right to self-medicate is gone. However I agree that a person's right to self-medicate should not infringe on the equal rights of others.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.